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Kristin VincentcloseAuthor: Kristin VincentName: Kristin VincentSite:About: Kristin Vincent is the Senior Information Architect and Manager of the Information Architecture Team at Barnes & Noble.com and was the project manager for the company's 2007 site-wide redesign. Prior to her role at B&N, Kristin was an Information Developer and Team Leader at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab where she designed data management software and conducted user tests to ensure the designs scaled to a global audience. She then moved to IBM's Research Triangle Park Lab in North Carolina where she led the strategy to determine what demos and tutorials would be included with IBM's suite of tools for web application development.

Kristin has a Masters Degree from Carnegie Mellon University focused on designing online environments. She earned a liberal arts certificate from Stanford University that centers on global and cultural studies and later earned a certificate in web technologies from the University of Washington's extension program. She also audited an information systems class at UC Berkeley and studied creative writing at Duke University.

Kristin is on the steering committee for the New York City Webgrrls chapter of Webgrrls International. In her role as the Team Webgrrls Outreach Coordinator, she leads the program that teaches underprivileged girls about technology and shows them how fun and exciting technology can be. She has been a mentor with the iMentor program in the Bronx and was an active volunteer in the Global Communications Gallery at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. She also volunteered at IBM's annual EXITE Camp (Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering), which teaches middle school girls about careers in engineering.

As a weekly contributor to the Webgrrls International Blog, Webgrrls Wisdom, Kristin focuses on how users interact in and with online environments and how designers can create information spaces that are innovative and easy to use.

There’s so much activity on the web that it’s hard to know what information to focus on. The article Data Visualization: Modern Approaches in Smashing Magazine has done an outstanding job pulling together a list of sites that visualize data in innovative ways. The article showcases an array of screen caps so you can see just how diverse data visualization can be. Many of the sites in the article synthesize the collective activity of people online to help you digest what the community at large is up to. Others provide examples of how to display data in compelling new ways using visuals.

Sick of boring pie charts and bar graphs? Because user behavior is constantly changing the data, the image that’s generated is always new. Here are some examples to get your mind churning about how you can punch up the data on your site. These new approaches encourage users to spend more time exploring and consuming the information.

Flickr Time

This is a shot I just took from Flickr Time, a site that arranges images that are being uploaded to Flickr in real time to represent the current time. This is what was going on at 8:37pm on Tuesday night as I write this.

Time

In a multimedia image entitled This Is Where We Live, Time shows that even data from simple population maps can be shown in new and interesting ways. Instead of the typical color coding, this article uses vertical spikes to show relative population density around the US.